I’m only about one-quarter of the way into it. So I’m not so sure about your questions; but I expect that I’d suggest it as a more-philosophical, less-empirical companion to Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow as an introduction to This Sort Of Thing. A lot of it does seem to have the summary nature, which is review for anyone not new to the subject; for instance, there’s yet another intro to Conway’s Life in (IIRC) one of the appendices. But it’s intended as an introductory book.
I can imagine a pretty good undergraduate “philosophy, rationality, and cognition” course using this book and Kahneman (among others). A really interesting course might use those two, Drescher’s Good and Real, and maybe Gary Cziko’s Without Miracles to cover evolutionary thinking ….
I’m only about one-quarter of the way into it. So I’m not so sure about your questions; but I expect that I’d suggest it as a more-philosophical, less-empirical companion to Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow as an introduction to This Sort Of Thing. A lot of it does seem to have the summary nature, which is review for anyone not new to the subject; for instance, there’s yet another intro to Conway’s Life in (IIRC) one of the appendices. But it’s intended as an introductory book.
I can imagine a pretty good undergraduate “philosophy, rationality, and cognition” course using this book and Kahneman (among others). A really interesting course might use those two, Drescher’s Good and Real, and maybe Gary Cziko’s Without Miracles to cover evolutionary thinking ….